He Has Refused To Buy A Computer Since 1988

As the rest of world prepared to launch into the future, where things would be much faster, easier life and accessibility by a click on a computer, essayist and cultural critic Wendell Berry was unimpressed.

Wendell Berry protested the arrival of the computer
and did not see or believe that the computer would liberate humankind.

He wrote a protest article titled; “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” in Harper’s Magazine”. Until today, he has not bought a computer and has never bought a smart phone.

In an exclusive interview first produced in the Christian Science Monitor, Wendell is still stuck to his rejection of the computerized world.

That perspective has lent the octogenarian a unique view of the role of technology in this increasingly digitized world.

From behind his typewriter, he has remained skeptical about what he sees as “a technological fundamentalism,” or blind faith in computers to liberate humanity.

Berry recently sat down with the Monitor at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.

The following discussion has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What
made you want to publicly declare your intention to abstain from the computer
bandwagon?

It
seemed to me that everybody was jumping into this as if it would save the
world. And that was really the way it was being advertised. “This is the
solution to all our problems. This is going to speed things up.” And so, I made
a little dissent. It’s really a tiny little no that I said.

While you were staging that “little dissent” President Ronald
Reagan declared the computer revolution “the greatest force for the advancement
of human freedom the world has ever seen.”

The
idea that you’re free if you buy everything that’s marketed to you is absurd.
You’ve become free only when you begin to choose. Take it – or leave it. That’s
our freedom, that’s real freedom.

The
way the human race practically bought into this computer sales talk was just
contemptible. You come on the market with this thing. It’s exactly the way they
marketed television. “This is the answer. Everybody’s going to be smarter now.
Everybody’s going to be in touch.” Same line. And they don’t anticipate any negative
result. Never.

Three decades later, conversations have turned to controlling
those unforeseen negative results. The shooter who recently killed 50 Muslim
worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, is reported to have found inspiration
for his belief system on the internet.

The
education industry argument always is that better education will do the trick.
And it’s up to us; we’re the last hope of mankind. They never think, much less
admit, that to educate a born crook is to make a worse crook than he would have
been without an education.

One of the appeals of computers is up-to-the-minute access to
information. It’s almost as if computers have transformed people, giving them
their own isolated command centers.

They
got whole libraries now in these things. And if you want to know something, you
could just ask your computer and it’ll tell you. But this doesn’t contribute to
the formation of a mind.

Information
refers to something with the power to inform. It’s formal. And it’s organic.
Your mind is made from within, to a certain extent, by information. Made from
without, too, because it responds to its social situation, and its geographic
situation, its cultural situation. This is really complex and really
interesting.

Nobody
could be bored who is really searching the world for knowledge to inform the
mind. So why stick a keyboard and a screen between the mind and the world? I’m
not without information. I study the fields, the woods, and the river. I read,
and I hear, and I remember.

In Martin Ford’s “Rise of the Robots,” he predicts that lawyers,
teachers, fast-food workers, radiologists, even journalists, all could be
mostly automated in the future.

There
is such a thing as human relations. And there is such a thing as getting a lot
of satisfaction, joy, fun from human relations. And I don’t understand why
people are willing to give up on that. When you write an article for a
magazine, you’re offering half – you’re part of a conversation. The reader is
invited to complete it, perhaps by disagreeing. This is a relationship.

The
only motive that’s worth anything is love. If you don’t do the work that you
love, and if you don’t do it for love, your artistry is not informed by love.
It can’t be any good. So there’s the argument, as far as I’m concerned, against
robots.

You can’t make a robot
that will work from love. It doesn’t work from anything; it doesn’t have any
motives. Or its motive is electricity, you could say.

So my little
essay about the computer, why I’m not going to buy a computer, was just a part
of my strategy to try to keep myself whole as a human being. I don’t want my
life to be lived for me by a machine.